Merry Christmas to all....

I'd like to start this post with a simple seasons greetings. While I realize many around the world don't celebrate Christmas, I do, so Merry Christmas! For those of other faiths with holidays around this time of the year, I hope your holiday season was full of peace and joy.
Ok, now that that's been taken care of, I have some iPhone app news. As you know, I've been trying to sell copies of a couple of iphone apps on the Apple App Store, one of which, Basketball Stats, I've been trying to actively market myself through the web. One of my methods, was to use a service called Link Share which is how Apple setup their affiliate program for iTunes. Basically, you get an additional 5% on every sale you generate, meaning you can bring your profits from 70% to 75% on sales you bring in. I have some good news! I just noticed I got my first two sales, both on 12/14! I'm not saying that this is the best sales anyone has ever done, but, for a beginner in the internet marketing realm, it's a start.

Another way to monetize iPhone Apps?

It's been a few days since my last post, but that doesn't mean I've been sitting around doing nothing. Instead, while trying to get ready for Christmas, I decided to take a brake a couple of days ago and start looking for other ways to monetize my iphone apps. Well, I found one that looks promising. It's called admob and basically, it's pay per click ads for the iphone. It was a breeze to setup, and now I'm just finishing some testing on my free app before putting it on the app store. One thing to note, I have to get it finished TONIGHT, because Apple is shutting down iTunes Connect from the 23rd through the 28th, so no chance to update during that time. Hopefully, they will be using that time to clear out some back log of apps pending approval, but I doubt it. Instead, I'm sure some lucky group of apps will sit there on the what's new lists for 5 or 6 days with lots of free exposure. Let's hope for the best, and have a Merry Christmas!

The new app, the first week

It's been about a week since my latest app, Basketball Stats, went live on the App Store. I thought I'd do a quick entry just to recap how it did the first week, and how it's done this week so far. Basically, I would say it's done better than I had expected, but not as well as I had hoped. I took quite a bit of time and put some time into marketing this one. I wrote articles, pointed them back to the web site, of course, blogged about the iphone app, made sure I had good keywords on my page, wrote a press release, and even a classified ad. All these measures did in fact get me noticed by the search engines, but I have yet to make any sales through the basketball stats iPhone App web site. How do I know this? Apple has an affiliate program, where if you sign up, you get 5% of every sale through your site, and as of now, I've had none. Of course, Basketball Stats has sold about 40 copies as of now, which, given it's been out for a week, I'm calling that a small win for a small developer building iPhone apps and putting them on the app store. Hopefully it continues selling at this rate, and I make some money with it while I start building then next iPhone app ;)

The new app is finally on the store

So the basketball stats app is now on the App Store. I took some extra time on this one trying to setup the website and sales copy. Better than my previous efforts, I think. Previously, I just threw together a bunch of text on a page, and didn't really do anything to format them.
However, this time, I thought about what I wanted to say in my sales copy, had my wife review it, revised it, and finally submitted it to apple. The process took a couple of extra days, but I think it was worth it. Despite a provider spamming the sports section, (400 VERY similar apps on the same day my app was approved, and another 100+ the next day) I've had some sales already. in about 2 days, I've had 16 sales, or more success than I had with BracketMan Pro in the first week.